Empire Falls

it that Grace had what she needed. Eventually, of course, he would return to school and finish his degree. “She’ll hate us both, Mrs. Whiting. You do realize that?”
    “You always did worry about the oddest things, dear boy,” the old woman replied nostalgically. Miles had no idea what she meant by this remark and was afraid to ask. “Your mother will no doubt be angry at first, but she will never find it in her heart to hate you. Whether or not she hates me is rather beside the point, don’t you think?”
    “What about—?”
    “My daughter?” Mrs. Whiting guessed, rather uncannily, Miles thought. “She’ll want to be here, of course. You know how devoted she is to your mother. Far more than to her own, I dare say. And when she finds out you’ll be here.… Still, I suppose she might be kept in Augusta for the most part, if you’d prefer.”
    “Mrs. Whiting,” Miles said, “why would I want that?”
    In response to this, silence. Meaning that he shouldn’t ask questions he didn’t want answered .
    “I understand she’s doing better?” Miles ventured. The summer before last he’d received an envelope at the restaurant in Rhode Island, addressed to him in his mother’s small, neat hand. Folded carefully inside a single sheet of Grace’s pale green note paper —Cindy is not doing well, she’d written . A card from you would mean the world —was a newspaper clipping. C. B. Whiting’s obituary from the Empire Gazette stated that Mr. Whiting, who had recently returned from Mexico, had died at home as the result of an accidental gunshot wound, the weapon having discharged while he was cleaning it .
    Miles would not learn the truth for nearly two months. He’d come home on Labor Day for the briefest of visits—registration at St. Luke’s started on Tuesday—and mentioned C. B. Whiting’s accident to his father. “What accident?” Max had snorted, then chuckled. “You put a loaded gun to your head and pull the trigger, the hole the bullet makes is no accident.”
    Which caused Miles to think back. Some part of his brain had registered that something about the obituary and his mother’s note was odd. It was unlike her to have so little to say about such a tragedy, especially one that touched her second family so directly. And had he thought about it, he might have noted another curious thing. The obituary was long, as befitted an important man, its details filling two columns. At the top of the second was “C. B. WHITING,” in boldface type that resembled the caption to a photo. It hadn’t occurred to Miles when he opened his mother’s letter, or later when his father revealed that the “accident” had been a suicide, to wonder why Grace had clipped around the photo. After all, Miles had never met the man, and wouldn’t have known him, to borrow one of Max’s favorite phrases, from a bag of assholes .
    “And on what basis do you understand that she’s doing better?” Mrs. Whiting said flatly .
    “My mother wrote—”
    “Yes, of course. But then, your mother is as devoted to my daughter as Cindy is to her. If wishing made it so, people the world over would visit our Grace instead of Lourdes.”
    Miles couldn’t help smiling ruefully. The woman still had the ability to nonplus him. In three and a half years at St. Luke’s, he’d never met anyone remotely like her .
    “Mrs. Whiting,” he said, “I owe you an apology.”
    “Whatever for, dear boy?”
    “I haven’t been back home much these last couple years. But when I was there, I should’ve come to see you.”
    “Well, never mind that,” she told him, without, he noted, denying the truth of his assertion. “You’re going to be home now. Aren’t you, dear boy?”
    O F COURSE , part of the reason that Miles hadn’t realized in high school that his mother was undergoing a transformation was that he attributed her increasing vagueness about their own family to years of disappointment and exhaustion and too much responsibility. He noticed—as Max did not, or didn’t appear to—that she was no longer vested in her husband, and he was troubled that Grace was so forgetful about his brother. But she was only rarely vague or distant with Miles himself. More often her concern for his future, far from abstract, bordered on mania. In fact, during Miles’s junior and senior years, Grace had two obsessions, equally powerful. She was determined that Miles would go to college and that Cindy Whiting would attend her senior